After reading the burly, burdensome and bulky text, I feel that I understand more about what future teachers such as myself are in for. One of the major themes I recognized in the Digital Detente was the struggle for control and authority. What we have learned so far in 307 is that we should not eschew new literacies in attempting to teach our students and to keep them ahead of or on top of the curve. Yet in the first essay, the challenge between print and media literacy is focused into a battle of controls: "The use of popular culture, represented by multi-media, may undermine the traditional control teachers enjoy when enacting prescribed curricula". And further down the page: "Students' competence with digitized multiliteracies must be delegitimated because it has the potential to destabilize teachers' control." (42) To me, this is entirely false. I see that while controlling every facet of your students learning is important in making the teaching process more comfortable, but the facts are that the world is changing. Students are more comfortable with working online than filling out dittos and reading from old, languid textbooks.
So certain people are concerned that they are losing control over the students with this new-fangled and surprisingly easy access to multi-media for personal entertainment and education. But yet, this is a huge breakthrough. Teachers can say that students can go play on computers when the work is done, but learning is still happening. Students are becoming more adroit with technology, which as we have learned over and over again, will become the forefront of education. And the faster that students become adept with mastering this technology, the better off they become: "Since information is ubiquitous, the learning goal becomes the transferable strategies that students use to critique and compare different information sources" (46).
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Interesting post!
Do you personally have any fears of feeling like you will lose control of your students due to technology? The thought hadn't occured to me in that sense until I read your post. Technology and the internet "x out" verbal and face to face interaction but also offers so many other learning tools, obviously. My fear is that I will go into a classroom where each student will have his/her own laptop and all I will here is the clicking of the key board and all I will see is the back of their heads. Who wants to sit in class and watch a classmate give a presenation on an overhead anymore when they can make it on youtube and watch it in the comfort of their own home? So much is changing but is it all for the better? Academically, sure it might be. But we are humans..will the internet be the only source of communication one day?
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